THE Ashley Judd-in-peril genre, which has been strip-mined to decreasing returns for the past few years, reaches rock bottom with “Twisted,” which is so utterly devoid of suspense, energy or credibility it should have been shipped straight to the remainder bin at Blockbuster.

Judd is preposterously cast as Jessica, a promiscuous, hard-drinking, newly promoted San Francisco police inspector with a nasty temper who isn’t above roughing up a suspect.

The corpses of a couple of her one-night stands are fished out of the bay, beaten bloody with cigarette burns on their hands.

Just about all of the sleazy characters – including Jessica, who drinks wine to the point of blacking out every single evening – are suspects.

There’s Jessica’s mentor, the shifty police chief (Samuel L. Jackson) who raised her after her dad, his former partner, shot Jessica’s mother to death and killed himself.

Suspicion also falls on Jessica’s new partner (Andy Garcia), who immediately courts her; her scuzzy cop ex-boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who likes rough sex; and a slimeball lawyer (D.W. Moffett), who’s looking for some more action with our heroine even when he visits a client she put in jail.

Somehow Jessica is allowed to investigate the serial murders – “I’m not pulling her from her first homicide case! It would kill her career!” bellows Jackson, who is in a neck-and-neck race with the eyeball-rolling Garcia for the year’s worst performance so far in a studio movie.

When even the suspects start getting killed off, the movie gets really ridiculous.

The absurd script credited to Sarah Thorp is crammed with such howlers (“Anyone who kills me turns up dead!” Jessica wails) and clichés that it crosses the border into self-parody.

It might have been a jumping-off for a Zucker brothers’ spoof of the thriller genre, but for the esteemed director Philip Kaufman (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), “Twisted” seems to have represented a tedious way to earn a paycheck between more rewarding assignments.

Certainly most of the cast seem less than engaged by the hokey material, though comedian Camryn Manheim as a wisecracking coroner seems to at least have a sense of humor about it.

The only mystery here is why Paramount studio chief Sherry Lansing hasn’t been fired despite green-lighting a long string of bombs like “Twisted.”